When Race Is the Issue, Misleading Coverage Sets Off an Uproar

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In the last couple of days, Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web site operator, has been called a liar, a provocateur, a propagandist — and even a race-baiter. But he says he knows who the true race-baiters are: some Democratic activists.

It was one of Mr. Breitbart’s Web sites, BigGovernment, that highlighted the heavily edited video clip of Shirley Sherrod, a black official at the Department of Agriculture, apparently saying that she had been biased against a white farmer she was supposed to help. Ms. Sherrod’s full speech actually demonstrated the opposite, but do not expect Mr. Breitbart to be embarrassed.

He says there is an election-year strategy under way to “falsely malign opponents of the Democratic party as racist” and that he will continue to fight it.

“It’s warfare out there,” he said in an interview on Sunday.

The “warfare” is happening partly in the conservative media, where Mr. Breitbart has shown an uncanny ability to play on the issue of race and have it amplified on news shows, talk shows and blogs. The Sherrod episode is hardly the first charge of reverse racism that has been raised by conservative media figures, nor the first that Mr. Breitbart has had a hand in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/business/media/26race.html?th&emc=th